“Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker”: Gene Simmons on Ace Frehley’s memorable audition for Kiss

Gene Simmons has been recalling what happened the day in late 1972 when Ace Frehley auditioned for Kiss. The then-21 year old guitarist, it seems, made a seismic impact.

Simmons was speaking on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent podcast and said of Frehley: “He immediately tore open the doors of what could be, what should be, because we were in a rat-infested loft, maybe twice as big as this room, with egg crates that we stuck on the wall that still had some cracked eggs.

"And, of course, at night huge dinosaur cockroaches would come out. Oh, it was horrible. There were no windows and everything. But we didn’t care. We were doing this thing and, ‘Wow,’ we’re hearing that sound.”

It seems that Frehley walked in and started playing while the other members were having a discussion. “We auditioned players… And Ace (comes in and) plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out. What are you doing? We’re talking.’”

Gene Simmons | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan - YouTube

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“He was oblivious that there was another meeting going on, that he had to sit there civilly and wait for his turn,” Simmons says. “And when he got up, we said, ‘Okay, listen, pal, we’re gonna do a song called Deuce. Here’s the riff. We’ll do two verses, bridge. When the riff starts, I’ll point to you. You’ve heard it enough, and you do a solo based on the riff.’”

“He said, ‘Ah, okay.’ And he talked like that. And we’re going, ‘Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker. Just pigeon toed and all. Oh, boy, this guy is gonna be…’”

Everything changed though when Frehley played: “And then he dug in. And his head, like he’s on stage, just that rubbery thing. And Paul and I looked at each other, ‘Wow!’ And you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you certainly know when you hear it and see it. And… it just kind of happened.”

During the interview Simmons praised Frehley’s diligence, recalling the way the guitarist would learn his solos and perfect them to the point that when played live they sounded identical to the studio recordings.

“He would play note for note with the right vibrato and everything. That’s when he was committed to it, and that’s one of the things live fans kept pointing to. ‘Wow, it sounds just like…’ You bet it is, ‘cause he cared enough to learn his own solos,” said the frontman. “His influences spoke loudly: (Jimmy) Page and (Jeff) Beck.”